12/27/2010

Edible Landscaping with Rosalind Creasy

This is Ros at a mutual friend's house, with another of her books.

Rosalind (Ros) Creasy is a world-class photographer and talented gardener. As far back as 1970 Ros was pioneering the methods of edible landscaping and her work since has revolutionized the way many homeowners think about their landscape.

"Author, photographer, landscape designer and environmentalist, Creasy has widely influenced the course of domestic gardening over the past 30 years. She kept the then barely flickering flame burning in her best-selling 1982 book, "Edible Landscaping." Newly reissued and substantially reworked, the book introduced a new style of vegetable gardening while rejecting the prevailing model of the garden as a male-dominated holdover from the farm, with discrete crops in rows," (read the complete story): The Washington Post, Nov. 25, 2010.

Pansies are a multi-purpose food, available almost the year around. (Better than lawn grass any day!)

That first book, back in 1982, has been a best seller and has influenced several generations of new gardeners. Her mantra of, "Don't mow it. Eat it" has encouraged countless homeowners to rip out their useless green lawns and replace them with things like lettuce, blueberries, apple trees, arugula and carrots.

Her new book, which is a complete make-over of that earlier stand-by, came out in November. It's already sold out and bookstores are awaiting more shipments from the publisher, not a surprise given the huge numbers of new gardeners.

Not only are tulips, "edible" they also have different flavors and great taste.

Ros is an award winning landscaper, too, so she has an eye for making a landscape spectacular, and at the same time filling it, not with useless azaleas and Japanese yews, but with plants that not only compliment the home, but provide food, as well. (I always call this method, making plants pay the rent for the space they take up in my landscape. It's not enough for a plant, in my opinion, to do nothing more than "be." Just because it's green, like those useless junipers landscapers tend to call, "foundation plantings," isn't justification to take up space in my yard. Ros has been preaching this for 40 years!

The book is outstanding, better than the first (although lots of us couldn't see how she could possibly improve on what she wrote all those years ago). In reading through it, I found photos of some of my friends' gardens, including Madalene Hill's garden at Festival Hill, outside Roundtop, TX, which I wrote about some months back. Edible Landscaping, at 400 pages, could well be the only gardening book you would ever need. It will inspire you, encourage you, but most of all it will be the inspiration of future generations of new gardeners to look beyond the lawn and see food in their landscape.

Congratulations, Ros, on a book that will be the bible of gardeners and homeowners for decades to come!

To see more about Rosalind Creasy's books, calendars and projects, visit her website: http://www.rosalindcreasy.com/

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